Full text of "The Loom Of Language"

to changes of pronunciation in the course of cen-
turies, the homophone part,which was once a sort of phonogram^ sound
symbol, may have lost its significance as such It no longer then gives
a clue to the spoken word To-day Chinese script is almost purely logo-
graphic. People who have the time to master it associate the characters
with the vocables they themselves utter These vocables are now very
different in different parts of China, and have changed beyond recog-
nition since the script came into use many centuries back. So educated
Chinese who cannot converse in the same tongue can read the same
notices in shops* or the same writings of moralists and poets who lived
jnore than a thousand yeais ago
The remarkable thing about Chinese script is not so much that it
is cumbersome according to our standards, as that it is possible to
reproduce the content of the living language in this way This is so
because the living language is not like that of any European people,
except the British (p 122). The Chinese word is invariable, like our
"verb" must It does not form a cluster of derivatives like lusts, lusted,
lusting* lusty. What we call the grammar of an Indo-European language
is largely about the form and choice of such derivatives, and it would
c